January 31, 2004 was the day that ultimately changed my life, when my young niece was killed in a car accident. She had been up all night getting high and attempted to drive home while exhausted. She had her two children in car seats in the back. One was just over a year old and the other one was almost three. It was a horrific car crash. They hit a tree at 70 MPH. The baby entered a coma, but the toddler saw his mother die. First responders were so devastated by the accident that two of them quit the field entirely.

I had been recently widowed and offered to take the children to raise. Their father said no. I didn’t know what happened to the children, as we were not allowed to see them. Then fifteen months later, the father was arrested on drug charges. The children went into CPS custody and ultimately to the paternal grandmother. After three months she gave them back, due to behavioral issues. They were like feral children, afraid of everything, wild and screaming. At the family meeting, I agreed to take the kids from foster care and raise them myself.

My mother didn’t want me to have the children. Their grandmother was a felon, with drug charges, and didn’t want to assist the children with any financial, emotional, or physical help, but she wanted to control how they were raised. My own family made it harder than it should have been. Ten years later they are still making my life hard.

I love my kids, and it is a difficult time with both of them now in their teen years. My daughter has often told me that she tries to keep the fact of adoption a secret. It seems that her classmates single her out because of it. My son will not speak of it at all. He was diagnosed with Oppositional Defiant Disorder and has always been a challenge to raise. The never-ending stress from two kids, work, and my family has given me health issues (I’m 58).

This year my son entered high school and it was a very difficult transition. I finally allowed him to go live with his grandmother. Personally I think it is a huge mistake, but he was not trying to work or seek help. I can honestly tell you that you can only help someone who is willing to help themselves. At 14, he must accept some responsibility for his actions or inactions.

I have to agree with your previous reader that a lot of personality is genetic. My daughter is like my own child but with my niece’s personality. My son and I love each other, but we are not alike at all.

Family adoption should be the easiest form of adoption, but I have experienced the exact opposite. My personal belief is that I should have taken the children and moved far away. That was out of the question with a single woman with two very difficult family members. I believed that the children should have a chance to know all of their family, from both sides, and that they should have a role in raising in the children. But it didn’t turn out that way. Everyone has an opinion on how to raise them, but no one wants any of the responsibility.

I am an adoptee born in 1962, the Secrets and Lies-era, back when records were almost always permanently sealed, thus ensuring that birth parents and their biological children would never reconnect.

Do I love my adoptive parents? Yes, I do. But there is a fundamental human need to know who we are and how we fit into the genealogical continuum of mankind. The Bible, for example, has pages of “begats” to trace lineage. More people than ever search genealogy sites like Ancestry.com trying to find information about their ancestors. It is a human instinct to yearn for this connection!

But not only is that connection denied to the adoptees of that era, we are castigated for even bringing it up. It is implied, or even directly accused, that if we have questions about our biological origins then we don’t love our adoptive families. That isn’t fair.

Parents can have two children or ten and love every single one of them. They aren’t asked to limit their love to one child. It is accepted that their hearts can hold enough love for all of them. Why, then, is it supposed that an adoptee seeking answered about their birth families couldn’t feel the same way? Why do we have to “choose”?

My birthmother had mourned my loss all her life (having been forced by her Italian Catholic parents into giving me up) and was overjoyed when I found her. It helped bring closure to the most painful experience of her life.

My adoptive parents reacted to this by dismissively claiming “she has nothing to do with you, she’s not your mother," and then refusing to hear any more about it. Meanwhile I, as a grown adult—not a child “belonging” to one parent or the other—remain caught in the middle.

So here’s what it’s like to be adopted: The parents who raised you are your parents and the relatives that you knew growing up are all “related” to you. But beyond that is nothing; I feel zero connection to “great-great grandmother So-and-So” who has no blood relationship to me whatsoever. Those ancestors belong to my parents and cousins, but not to me.

On the other hand, it is the complete opposite with my birth family. With them, I do not feel that they are my parents, siblings, cousins, etc. in the sense that I feel that way about the family I grew up with. They are strangers who are related to me by blood, but we have no shared history. Yet when they talk about our mutual “great-great grandmother So-and-So,” then I DO feel connected. The same blood that ties them to our ancestors ties me as well. We are equally connected that way.

This is a dichotomy that no non-adopted person will ever face or understand. It is something every adoptee (of a closed adoption) experiences to some degree. Without an origin story, which everyone else takes for granted, we feel rather like we were just found under a cabbage patch with no link to the past and no bloodline to pass on to our own children.

When we have Family Tree projects in school, it cuts deeply. We were grafted onto our tree, we have a deep sense that we don’t really belong there, yet we have no idea where our own tree is planted.

That’s one of the lessons a reader, Kelly Robinson, draws from a tragic experience:

Biologically, I could have had children, but I chose to adopt instead. I adopted my beautiful baby girl at birth from a woman in Northern California I had met three months prior, when she was about five months pregnant. She was homeless and had two children, ages 6 and 10. Her boyfriend, whose sister-in-law had already adopted out a child, had influenced the birthmother’s decision to give her baby away. She said it was a case of date rape that had gotten her pregnant, and she feared the biological father might come looking for the baby. She and her boyfriend thought it was in the best interest of the baby to find her another family.

I went to California the day she was born. I fell in love with the woman who handed over this child to me, as I collapsed in the hospital chair overwhelmed with instant love.

She left the hospital and I stayed. I also had to stay in California until my adoption papers went through the intra-state compact for approval to bring my child back to Missouri. The birthmother insisted I stay with her, and over those five days she helped me understand how to care for my baby. My mom had died three months before this wonderful event, leaving me without a mother from which to learn from.

After the adoption, the birthmother and I still kept in touch. She started sounding very depressed. She and her boyfriend had been fighting a lot. It sounded as if she was back on drugs when I would talk to her on the phone. She wasn’t able to get a job or go to school, as she’d enthusiastically talked about before giving birth.

One night she told me that her kids and boyfriend were being mean to her. She said “they don’t realize I am in post-partum depression.” I offered support, but I didn’t know exactly what to do. Post-partum depression is real. It can be devastating. I can only imagine how much worse it is for someone who’s adopted out a child.

But she didn’t change her mind; she still seemed satisfied with her decision to adopt out her daughter, thinking it was best for the baby. As I stated before, I had fallen hard for her as a person, her integrity to her word, her loving ways of handling the adoption in the hospital room and at her house. She’d even asked me if I’d adopt her other two children if anything happened to her. I said I would.

About three months after our daughter was born, I received a message from someone who’d known the birthmother. She said that our loving, beautiful birthmother had died. She had overdosed on heroin in the bathtub talking to her boyfriend by phone.

That was the saddest day of my life. The sacrifice she’d gone through was huge, and the weight of it immense, without someone there to help her get through it.

All adoption situations are different, but it’s difficult for all the birthmothers. Stand by these wonderful women. Never judge a birthmother. Always know that she sacrificed much to give her child a family.

I was struck by the title of your reader note “Better Off Without Birthparents,” as it exaggerated the pain I already feel about my own daughter’s related sentiments.

I am a birthmother. I chose open adoption for my daughter 20 years ago, when open adoption wasn’t very common or studied. I was young, scared, with an unplanned pregnancy, and I was too poor to care for my daughter on my own. The process of making a decision like adoption when you are young, single, and pregnant and fears are high—not to mention hormones raging through the uncharted territory of pregnancy in your own body—is absolutely torturous. There is an immediate lifelong emotional connection being made with the child inside of you, but logic is trying to prevail.

I thought I was doing the right thing by her when I chose open adoption. She ended up in a family across the country from me, and I viewed it as granting someone else permission and the gift of raising her. But with open adoption, since I would still be in her life, I still viewed myself very much as her mother. I just saw it as her having two mothers. Equal but different.

What I didn’t realize when I made that choice was that I was rejecting myself.

I rejected my own ability to care for her. I rejected that I could be enough. I rejected my strength to get on my feet and survive. To persevere. I made the horrifying decision that some other woman, whom I didn’t even know, would be better suited for my own child than me, her biological mother.

Because I was young, I believed that where I was in life at that point would last forever. And that place was not ideal for a baby. When time and experience taught me that circumstances change and life is always moving forward, it was too late to go back. The papers were already signed. She was someone else’s now. Forever.

We did end up staying in each other’s lives. We visited at least once a year. We talked on the phone and sent letters, photos, texts, and the like. As the years progressed, I found it more and more difficult to watch someone else raise my child, not to mention watch my child call someone else “mom.” I had no voice in the choices they made for her. I was forced to sit back and observe, while my child grew without me in a home that was entirely foreign to my own.

It has been the ultimate form of psychological and emotional torture. The worst hit me when my daughter considered suicide and ended up in a hospital, and I wasn’t allowed to contact her because I wasn't a direct relative. Or was it years earlier when she wanted to run away and considered living with me, but her parents wouldn’t grant me legal guardianship to take her to the doctors in case of illness or emergency, so it didn’t happen.

Sitting back and watching your child hurt without the ability to do anything but scream in silence is indescribable. I brought my daughter into this world and made a self-sacrificing decision to do what I thought was best for her, and because of ink laid out on two square inches of paper when she was only days old, I had no right to care for her ever again.

And then, this past year, when she entered college and I expressed my joy that I could somehow be more free to be a mother to her, she became angry and insulted that I would suggest such a thing. She clarified that I am not her mother—that I gave up that right a long time ago and I don’t ever get to have it back.

Children have the ultimate power to destroy their parents, and in my mind I have never not been her mother. But she has destroyed me with the reality of where her heart lies.

In her mind, perhaps she is better off without her birthparent. In my mind, I am not her birthmother. I am her mother. She is not my “birth daughter.” She is my daughter. And to think that your own child is better off without you is excruciating. It’s only echoing the fears and insecurities I had in my own head when I made the decision of adoption: “maybe she’s better off without me.”

But nothing in my heart believes it. And it’s painful to be a part of the silenced side of adoption: a birthparent. There is a lot of focus on adopted kids and adoptive parents. But for every one of those, there is a mother out there who gave birth to that child and might be hurting so deeply on the inside for the remainder of her life.

I was raised by wonderful adoptive parents. The bullies weren’t just kids, as your reader suggested. When I was 10 and my mom died, her sister asked to take some family furniture that she said should “stay in the family.” Fortunately dad put a stop to that. In high school, a teacher told us how if a mother had to choose between an adopted and birth child, she would always choose the birth child. Dad too intervened and had the teacher apologize to the entire class.

My brother had a lot of emotional issues that came from his genes. But despite his emotional demons, he’s a college-educated, well-employed adult. I have no doubt he would be a lout or in jail if not for how my father raised him.

Now I’m in my forties and met both birth parents. My birth father is a jerk. My birth mother is wonderful and we get along great, but it’s never the same bond as it is with the parents who raised you.

Another reader has a longer story:

I was adopted at birth, born in 1956 to an unwed Catholic woman in Michigan who entered into the arrangement through Probate Court. My records are still sealed to me. My adoptive parents were not well to do, and when my mom divorced my dad at around the time I was 10, we were even less well off.

My mother had emotional problems, and each time I asked her about my adoption, she would tell me something different:

“Your mother didn’t want you, but I did, so now you are mine.” “She was engaged to another man when she got pregnant with you and had to give you up to get married.” “She was a drunk and had more kids and didn’t want you.”

I knew that MY mother, my “real” mom, didn’t love me. Why else would she abandon me? As long as I can recall, I have had a hole in my heart, knowing that something was wrong with me, terrified that if people knew me they would not want me around. I’ve always hated Mother's Day, and a basic distrust of the Catholic Church.

All my life I’ve heard that women who give up their children for adoption are selfless and “want only the best” for their child. If that is true, why do they not send along a note to the child to allow them to understand why they were given up? Why is it that even now I cannot be told the circumstances of my birth without her permission? Even now? I am nearly 60. What harm would it do?

By the way, in the late ‘90s, my mother who raised me did give me a sealed envelop telling me her understanding of my adoption circumstances, but after 40 years I was afraid to pursue it. She died in 2011, and last year I located my birth mother through Google. I wrote her last November, inviting her to respond. I was not seeking a relationship; I just wanted her to acknowledge me. She did not answer.

I also joined Ancestry.com and had an autosomal DNA test. There were few matches and most were such distant predicted relations that I gave up thinking I would ever know about my family. Still, I built a tree from my mom’s maiden name. (She was from a small town in Michigan and had a fairly uncommon name.) Not long ago I received a match with a predicted 1st - 2nd cousin relationship, who had a public tree showing a connection to my mother. Her mother was married to my mother’s brother. Strengthened by this tenuous link, I decided to call my birth mother.

She told me I was wrong and it was not her, and she didn’t know why my mom would have given me her name. I questioned her more and she faltered in her answers and I had the feeling she was making things up as she went along. Finally I asked her why it was that I had a DNA link to a member of her family and she just said she didn’t know.

So, I am still rejected by her. Strangely, having talked to her and hearing her rejection voiced changed things for me. I now know what kind of person she is, and am glad I was adopted. I only wish I had done it before my mom died, so I could tell her she was right after all. My idea of who my “real mom” was turned a complete about-face.

I still intend to research my biological family connections through genetic genealogy, and am currently following a lead that may be a link to my birth father. I am waiting for a response to my request to Michigan’s Central Adoption Agency to provide the non-identifying information about my adoption, though I don’t hold much hope that there is much.

I firmly believe that every individual has a right to know the circumstances of their birth and the identity of their parents, at least once they reach the age of majority. Our biological parents may not want a relationship with us, but we have a right to know our origins.

During my life I’ve met many other adoptees. Most of them had similar feelings. Yes, there have been a few that were happy growing up, but they’ve been in the minority. Many had substance abuse problems. I drank too much for a long time, especially when my feelings of rejection were triggered. I just wanted to escape this life, where others had parents that wanted them.

I don’t know why I’ve emailed, but maybe if enough of us tell you what it is really like to be adopted, the insane idea that birth parents are some kind of hero will stop, and adoptees will have the right to judge for themselves if they did them a favor.

Olga addresses “the adoption paradox”—that on average, children who are adopted have wealthier, more involved parents but also more behavioral and attention problems. A reader broaches the nature vs. nurture debate in this context:

I admire people who adopt and am glad there are people who put their resources, time and love into a child that is not theirs from a biological point of view. However, that child’s biological inheritance is a wildcard and the adoptive parents may not have an easy ride in that respect.

Another reader, turning to nurture, insists that Olga’s piece “missed a very important problem”:

I am the single parent of two internationally adopted children who are now adults. They both had issues in their early public school years—not related to behavior or attention problems, but directly related to bullying.

Bullying is a topic that has been covered extensively and the effects of bullying on children are well known. Does it not seem obvious that a young child who is reacting to being bullied may appear to have attention issues and/or behavior issues?

When my children were young, they very innocently shared their adoption stories with their peers only to have those stories thrown back in their faces in a very cruel way. Taunts like “you don’t belong here,” “nobody wanted you,” “where’s your real Mom, maybe she’s dead”; these and many others were common.

My younger child also got some cruel lessons in racism the very first day of first grade. Not one teacher was ever aware of what was going on. Although teachers told me, in a very condescending way, that they were always aware of what was happening and had a zero-tolerance policy toward bullying, the truth is they were clueless and not at all helpful.

In the end, when my children had completed 4th and 6th grade, I took them out of school and home-schooled them. They both finished up their schooling, finishing high school in three years, and went on to college. In college they both achieved very high grades, got academic scholarships and were admitted to honor societies. My oldest is now a graduate student who intends to become a history professor and my younger child is completing a degree in communications.

For the most part we have gotten past the hurt and emotional damage caused by the bullying, although I do believe this leaves some lifetime scars. They are also at peace with their adoption stories, knowing that a part of their history will always be missing.

What do you think, especially if you’re an adoptive parent or were raised by adoptive parents? Drop me an email and I’ll post your perspective.

Despite the easing of taboos and the rise of hookup apps, Americans are in the midst of a sex recession.

These should be boom times for sex.

The share of Americans who say sex between unmarried adults is “not wrong at all” is at an all-time high. New cases of HIV are at an all-time low. Most women can—at last—get birth control for free, and the morning-after pill without a prescription.

If hookups are your thing, Grindr and Tinder offer the prospect of casual sex within the hour. The phrase If something exists, there is porn of it used to be a clever internet meme; now it’s a truism. BDSM plays at the local multiplex—but why bother going? Sex is portrayed, often graphically and sometimes gorgeously, on prime-time cable. Sexting is, statistically speaking, normal.

Donald Trump likes to pit elite and non-elite white people against each other. Why do white liberals play into his trap?

“I want them to talk about racism every day,” Steve Bannon, President Donald Trump’s former strategist, told The American Prospectlast year. “If the left is focused on race and identity, and we go with economic nationalism, we can crush the Democrats.”

Bannon was tapping into an old American tradition. As early as the 1680s, powerful white people were serving up racism to assuage the injuries of class, elevating the status of white indentured servants over that of enslaved black people. Some two centuries later, W. E. B. Du Bois observed that poor white people were compensated partly by a “public and psychological wage”—the “wages of whiteness,” as the historian David Roediger memorably put it. These wages pit people of different races against one another, averting a coalition based on shared economic interests.

Years later, many adults still pine for the days their school libraries, auditoriums, and gyms transformed into pop-up bookstores.

In the early 1980s, the world of school book fairs was “a highly competitive and very secretive industry,” according to a New York Timesarticleat the time. The fairs numbered in the thousands and spanned the United States. They were put on by a mix of organizers: A few national corporations, about 25 to 30 regional companies, and assorted bookstores.

By the 1990s, one organizer reigned: the Scholastic Corporation. Scholastic, founded in 1920 to publish books and magazines aimed at young readers, had purchased several of its smaller competitors. The company became the largest operator of children’s book fairs in the country, a title it still holds today.

But we’re not here to talk about Scholastic’s business history, and I think you know that. If you’re a young adult who attended elementary school in the United States, I’d guess that when you saw the headline on this story, something deep inside your mind cracked open. With an unmistakable pang of nostalgia,the memory of a Scholastic book fair, with all its concomitant joys, came flooding in.

Another big project has found that only half of studies can be repeated. And this time, the usual explanations fall flat.

Over the past few years, an international team of almost 200 psychologists has been trying to repeat a set of previously published experiments from its field, to see if it can get the same results. Despite its best efforts, the project, called Many Labs 2, has only succeeded in 14 out of 28 cases. Six years ago, that might have been shocking. Now it comes as expected (if still somewhat disturbing) news.

In recent years, it has become painfully clear that psychology is facing a “reproducibility crisis,” in which even famous, long-established phenomena—the stuff of textbooks and TED Talks—might not be real. There’s social priming, where subliminal exposures can influence our behavior. And ego depletion, the idea that we have a limited supply of willpower that can be exhausted. And the marshmallow test, where our ability to resist gratification in early childhood predicts our achievements in later life. And the facial-feedback hypothesis, which simply says that smiling makes us feel happier.

At an inaugural desert festival of yogis and spirit guides like Russell Brand, an exclusive industry grapples with consumerism, addiction, and the actual meaning of wellness.

I first felt reality shift when, at 7 a.m. on a Saturday, there was a line for a class called Body Blast Bootcamp, and I worried that there wouldn’t be enough room for everyone.

The draw to this explicitly not-fun undertaking, others in line told me, was that we would be glad to have done it when it was over. We all made it in, and the workout studio was a carpeted conference room where an Instagram-famous instructor with a microphone headset was waiting to give us high fives. “The hardest step is showing up!”

Once we started working out, a person walked around apparently taking Instagram videos, and people were not bothered by this. Another brought a mini tripod to get some shots of herself in action. There was shouting and a Coldplay house remix. Someone offered me a box of alkaline water, and I drank it because no neutral water was available.

The civil-liberties organization has taken a stand against stronger due-process protections in campus tribunals that undermines its own principles.

Last week, the NRA kept defending gun rights, the AARP kept advocating for older Americans, and the California Avocado Commission was as steadfast as ever in touting “nature’s highest achievement.” By contrast, the ACLU issued a public statement that constituted a stark, shortsighted betrayal of the organization’s historic mission: It vehemently opposed stronger due-process rights for the accused.

The matter began when Secretary of Education Betsy DeVos put forth new guidelines on how to comply with Title IX, the law that forbids colleges that receive federal funding to exclude any students, deny them benefits, or subject them to any discrimination on the basis of sex.

The most controversial changes concern what happens when a student stands accused of sexual misbehavior. “Under the new rules, schools would be required to hold live hearings and would no longer rely on a so-called single investigator model,” TheNew York Timesreports. “Accusers and students accused of sexual assault must be allowed to cross-examine each other through an adviser or lawyer. The rules require that the live hearings be conducted by a neutral decision maker and conducted with a presumption of innocence. Both parties would have equal access to all the evidence that school investigators use to determine facts of the case, and a chance to appeal decisions.” What’s more, colleges will now have the option to choose a somewhat higher evidentiary standard, requiring “clear and convincing evidence” rather than “a preponderance of the evidence” in order to establish someone’s guilt.

Their huge mounds cover an area the size of Britain, and are visible from space.

In the east of Brazil, mysterious cones of earth rise from the dry, hard-baked soil. Each of these mounds is about 30 feet wide at its base, and stands six to 13 feet tall. From the ground, with about 60 feet of overgrown land separating each mound from its neighbors, it’s hard to tell how many there are. But their true extent becomes dramatically clear from space.

Using satellite images, Roy Funch from the State University of Feira de Santana has estimated that there are about 200 million of these mounds. They’re arrayed in an uncannily regular honeycomb-like pattern. Together, they cover an area roughly the size of Great Britain or Oregon, and they occupy as much space as the Great Pyramid of Giza 4,000 times over. And this colossal feat of engineering is, according to Funch, the work of the tiniest of engineers—a species of termite called Syntermes dirus, whose workers are barely half an inch long.

At an international conference, allies grieved the loss of the United States they had believed in.

Updated at 2:50 p.m. ET on November 19, 2018

The Halifax Security Forum is designed to be a gathering of the world’s democratic countries, which are allied to protect each other. Hosted by the Canadian defense minister, the Forum’s signature is the brief videos that introduce the annual gathering. This year’s intro showed relay runners, mostly American, at the Olympics from Berlin in 1936 forward, ending in an uncertain baton handoff—a powerful metaphor for the free world’s worries about American leadership in the age of Trump.*

The Halifax Forum, occurring just after President Donald Trump unleashed yet another petulant tirade against Germany and France that culminated in the unseemly taunt that Parisians were speaking German until the U.S. intervened in World Wars I and II, had a funereal feel this year. Allies are grieving the loss of an America they believed in, as it sinks in that they cannot rely on us any longer.

The president says the United States immigration system is broken. How could it be fixed?

President Donald Trump says that the U.S. immigration system is broken, and in recent days he has railed against what he says is an “invasion” by Central American migrants making their way to the United States. Along with a regular diet of tweets to that effect, he has accelerated the process begun during the Obama presidency of deporting those in the country illegally; criticized the migration of family members of American citizens; and called for a merit-based system of immigration.

Trump’s support for a policy that attracts skilled workers might run counter to his administration’s actual actions, but it underscores a conundrum that has bedeviled successive presidential administrations: how to fix the country’s immigration system, with its years-long backlogs and millions of undocumented workers, while remaining competitive in a global marketplace.

Alexandria Ocasio-Cortez arrives in Congress with a bigger megaphone than any other House freshman. How's she going to use it?

QUEENS, N.Y.—“Choosing not to speak,” Alexandria Ocasio-Cortez was telling me one day last month, “is taken and read just as deliberately as choosing to speak.”

Fresh off her upset primary victory over Representative Joe Crowley here, the nation’s most famous congressional candidate was speaking pretty much everywhere this summer—stumping for fellow progressives all over the country, hitting the late-night talk shows, and jousting with her many conservative critics on Twitter.

Last week, Ocasio-Cortez made her Washington debut in similar fashion.

In town for the biannual weeklong orientation session for newly elected members of Congress, the 29-year-old progressive star from the Bronx narrated the experience in Instagram stories to her 642,000 followers, complained about being mistaken for a congressional spouse or intern on Twitter, and called out a conservative journalist who suggested she was dressed too fancily for “a girl who struggles.”

Despite the easing of taboos and the rise of hookup apps, Americans are in the midst of a sex recession.

These should be boom times for sex.

The share of Americans who say sex between unmarried adults is “not wrong at all” is at an all-time high. New cases of HIV are at an all-time low. Most women can—at last—get birth control for free, and the morning-after pill without a prescription.

If hookups are your thing, Grindr and Tinder offer the prospect of casual sex within the hour. The phrase If something exists, there is porn of it used to be a clever internet meme; now it’s a truism. BDSM plays at the local multiplex—but why bother going? Sex is portrayed, often graphically and sometimes gorgeously, on prime-time cable. Sexting is, statistically speaking, normal.

Donald Trump likes to pit elite and non-elite white people against each other. Why do white liberals play into his trap?

“I want them to talk about racism every day,” Steve Bannon, President Donald Trump’s former strategist, told The American Prospectlast year. “If the left is focused on race and identity, and we go with economic nationalism, we can crush the Democrats.”

Bannon was tapping into an old American tradition. As early as the 1680s, powerful white people were serving up racism to assuage the injuries of class, elevating the status of white indentured servants over that of enslaved black people. Some two centuries later, W. E. B. Du Bois observed that poor white people were compensated partly by a “public and psychological wage”—the “wages of whiteness,” as the historian David Roediger memorably put it. These wages pit people of different races against one another, averting a coalition based on shared economic interests.

Years later, many adults still pine for the days their school libraries, auditoriums, and gyms transformed into pop-up bookstores.

In the early 1980s, the world of school book fairs was “a highly competitive and very secretive industry,” according to a New York Timesarticleat the time. The fairs numbered in the thousands and spanned the United States. They were put on by a mix of organizers: A few national corporations, about 25 to 30 regional companies, and assorted bookstores.

By the 1990s, one organizer reigned: the Scholastic Corporation. Scholastic, founded in 1920 to publish books and magazines aimed at young readers, had purchased several of its smaller competitors. The company became the largest operator of children’s book fairs in the country, a title it still holds today.

But we’re not here to talk about Scholastic’s business history, and I think you know that. If you’re a young adult who attended elementary school in the United States, I’d guess that when you saw the headline on this story, something deep inside your mind cracked open. With an unmistakable pang of nostalgia,the memory of a Scholastic book fair, with all its concomitant joys, came flooding in.

Another big project has found that only half of studies can be repeated. And this time, the usual explanations fall flat.

Over the past few years, an international team of almost 200 psychologists has been trying to repeat a set of previously published experiments from its field, to see if it can get the same results. Despite its best efforts, the project, called Many Labs 2, has only succeeded in 14 out of 28 cases. Six years ago, that might have been shocking. Now it comes as expected (if still somewhat disturbing) news.

In recent years, it has become painfully clear that psychology is facing a “reproducibility crisis,” in which even famous, long-established phenomena—the stuff of textbooks and TED Talks—might not be real. There’s social priming, where subliminal exposures can influence our behavior. And ego depletion, the idea that we have a limited supply of willpower that can be exhausted. And the marshmallow test, where our ability to resist gratification in early childhood predicts our achievements in later life. And the facial-feedback hypothesis, which simply says that smiling makes us feel happier.

At an inaugural desert festival of yogis and spirit guides like Russell Brand, an exclusive industry grapples with consumerism, addiction, and the actual meaning of wellness.

I first felt reality shift when, at 7 a.m. on a Saturday, there was a line for a class called Body Blast Bootcamp, and I worried that there wouldn’t be enough room for everyone.

The draw to this explicitly not-fun undertaking, others in line told me, was that we would be glad to have done it when it was over. We all made it in, and the workout studio was a carpeted conference room where an Instagram-famous instructor with a microphone headset was waiting to give us high fives. “The hardest step is showing up!”

Once we started working out, a person walked around apparently taking Instagram videos, and people were not bothered by this. Another brought a mini tripod to get some shots of herself in action. There was shouting and a Coldplay house remix. Someone offered me a box of alkaline water, and I drank it because no neutral water was available.

The civil-liberties organization has taken a stand against stronger due-process protections in campus tribunals that undermines its own principles.

Last week, the NRA kept defending gun rights, the AARP kept advocating for older Americans, and the California Avocado Commission was as steadfast as ever in touting “nature’s highest achievement.” By contrast, the ACLU issued a public statement that constituted a stark, shortsighted betrayal of the organization’s historic mission: It vehemently opposed stronger due-process rights for the accused.

The matter began when Secretary of Education Betsy DeVos put forth new guidelines on how to comply with Title IX, the law that forbids colleges that receive federal funding to exclude any students, deny them benefits, or subject them to any discrimination on the basis of sex.

The most controversial changes concern what happens when a student stands accused of sexual misbehavior. “Under the new rules, schools would be required to hold live hearings and would no longer rely on a so-called single investigator model,” TheNew York Timesreports. “Accusers and students accused of sexual assault must be allowed to cross-examine each other through an adviser or lawyer. The rules require that the live hearings be conducted by a neutral decision maker and conducted with a presumption of innocence. Both parties would have equal access to all the evidence that school investigators use to determine facts of the case, and a chance to appeal decisions.” What’s more, colleges will now have the option to choose a somewhat higher evidentiary standard, requiring “clear and convincing evidence” rather than “a preponderance of the evidence” in order to establish someone’s guilt.

Their huge mounds cover an area the size of Britain, and are visible from space.

In the east of Brazil, mysterious cones of earth rise from the dry, hard-baked soil. Each of these mounds is about 30 feet wide at its base, and stands six to 13 feet tall. From the ground, with about 60 feet of overgrown land separating each mound from its neighbors, it’s hard to tell how many there are. But their true extent becomes dramatically clear from space.

Using satellite images, Roy Funch from the State University of Feira de Santana has estimated that there are about 200 million of these mounds. They’re arrayed in an uncannily regular honeycomb-like pattern. Together, they cover an area roughly the size of Great Britain or Oregon, and they occupy as much space as the Great Pyramid of Giza 4,000 times over. And this colossal feat of engineering is, according to Funch, the work of the tiniest of engineers—a species of termite called Syntermes dirus, whose workers are barely half an inch long.

At an international conference, allies grieved the loss of the United States they had believed in.

Updated at 2:50 p.m. ET on November 19, 2018

The Halifax Security Forum is designed to be a gathering of the world’s democratic countries, which are allied to protect each other. Hosted by the Canadian defense minister, the Forum’s signature is the brief videos that introduce the annual gathering. This year’s intro showed relay runners, mostly American, at the Olympics from Berlin in 1936 forward, ending in an uncertain baton handoff—a powerful metaphor for the free world’s worries about American leadership in the age of Trump.*

The Halifax Forum, occurring just after President Donald Trump unleashed yet another petulant tirade against Germany and France that culminated in the unseemly taunt that Parisians were speaking German until the U.S. intervened in World Wars I and II, had a funereal feel this year. Allies are grieving the loss of an America they believed in, as it sinks in that they cannot rely on us any longer.

The president says the United States immigration system is broken. How could it be fixed?

President Donald Trump says that the U.S. immigration system is broken, and in recent days he has railed against what he says is an “invasion” by Central American migrants making their way to the United States. Along with a regular diet of tweets to that effect, he has accelerated the process begun during the Obama presidency of deporting those in the country illegally; criticized the migration of family members of American citizens; and called for a merit-based system of immigration.

Trump’s support for a policy that attracts skilled workers might run counter to his administration’s actual actions, but it underscores a conundrum that has bedeviled successive presidential administrations: how to fix the country’s immigration system, with its years-long backlogs and millions of undocumented workers, while remaining competitive in a global marketplace.

Alexandria Ocasio-Cortez arrives in Congress with a bigger megaphone than any other House freshman. How's she going to use it?

QUEENS, N.Y.—“Choosing not to speak,” Alexandria Ocasio-Cortez was telling me one day last month, “is taken and read just as deliberately as choosing to speak.”

Fresh off her upset primary victory over Representative Joe Crowley here, the nation’s most famous congressional candidate was speaking pretty much everywhere this summer—stumping for fellow progressives all over the country, hitting the late-night talk shows, and jousting with her many conservative critics on Twitter.

Last week, Ocasio-Cortez made her Washington debut in similar fashion.

In town for the biannual weeklong orientation session for newly elected members of Congress, the 29-year-old progressive star from the Bronx narrated the experience in Instagram stories to her 642,000 followers, complained about being mistaken for a congressional spouse or intern on Twitter, and called out a conservative journalist who suggested she was dressed too fancily for “a girl who struggles.”